Allen Williams came up out of Princeton, West Virginia - the county seat of Mercer County in the southern West Virginia coalfields region, the town along Interstate 77 just over the Virginia state line from Bluefield. Princeton High School, the Tigers, had been one of the West Virginia high school basketball powers of the late 1970s. Allen Williams was 6'8" by his senior year. He was the kind of long, post-playing forward who, in the small-school West Virginia high school basketball landscape of 1979-80, could change a regional bracket.
His junior season at Princeton, 1978-79, ended with the Princeton Tigers winning the West Virginia Class AAA state basketball championship. Princeton was, at that moment, a team built around what the next year's box scores would identify as the team's captain - a long 6'8" forward who could rebound at both ends of the floor. His senior year, 1979-80, ended with Allen Williams named to the West Virginia Sportswriters Association Class AAA First Team All-State - and his name was the one with the parenthetical (c) next to it, the designation reserved for the team captain. The captain of the Class AAA First Team All-State squad in the same year his Princeton High School Tigers had reached the AAA state tournament. That was the resume that came to the attention of the Duke head basketball coach who was, in the spring of 1980, finishing his Elite Eight run and about to leave Durham for South Carolina.
Bill Foster, the Duke head coach who had taken the 1978 Blue Devils to the NCAA national championship game and the 1979-80 Blue Devils to the Elite Eight, signed Allen Williams to a Duke scholarship in the spring of 1980. By the time Williams arrived in Durham in October 1980 to begin his freshman year, the head coach who had signed him was gone - Foster had left for South Carolina. The new Duke head coach was a thirty-three-year-old former West Point coach named Mike Krzyzewski, hired by Tom Butters that March. Coach K's first Duke recruiting class was being assembled. Allen Williams was a Foster recruit. He walked into the Coach K era anyway.